Aleks Krotoski examines how computer gaming is affecting our culture – by creating genuine works of art, by altering our notions of storytelling, and by simple virtue of being the cultural medium many people spend most time attached to.

Computer or videogames have been around for 40 years, but the wider cultural implications have tended to be glossed over in favour of discussion of the size of the gaming economy and concerns about games’ social impact.

Yet in recent years the artfulness of games has grown so much that the Smithsonian in Washington DC is now hosting a major exhibition of gaming art.

New technology and the spread of games to phones, tablets and PCs are creating millions of new users.

The immersive possibilities of this uniquely-interactive medium are just being explored.

HTML5. It’s more than paving the cowpaths. It’s more than markup. There’s a lot of stuff in the spec about databases and communication protocols and blahdiblah backend juju. Some of that stuff is pretty radical. And it will change how you design websites. Why? Because for the last twenty years, web designers have been creating inside of a certain set of constraints. We’ve been limited in what’s possible by the technology that runs the web. We became so used to those limits, we stopped thinking about them. They became invisible. They Just Are. Of course the web works this certain way. Of course a user clicks and waits, the page loads, like this… but guess what? That’s not what the web will look like in the future. The constrains have changed. Come hear a non-nerd explanation of the new possibilities created by HTML5’s APIs. Don’t just wait around to see how other people implement these technologies. Learn about HTML APIs yourself, so you can design for and create the web of the future.

The web is founded on open, decentralised principles. This means anyone can build a site that can link to any other, without any need for proprietary technology. No one owns e-mail, usenet or http, but social services like Facebook and Twitter are—for the most part—silo’d businesses with their own networks and proprietary APIs. You can join them together in code, but they’re not in any way ‘interoperable’.

This panel will explore why large and centralized seems to dominate, whether it’s a bug or a feature. We’ll take a critical eye at new attempts at building distributed social web products like Diaspora. We won’t be focusing on the technical specifications as much as the end user experience and the business models that could support them. If a distributed service wouldn’t be fun, easy to use or profitable, then is there really any point in building one…?

Evan Prodromou, CTO, StatusNet Inc

Founder and creator of the StatusNet open source social platform, Evan is the co-chair of the W3C’s working group on federated social web technologies.

The relationship most adults have with science is one of observation: watching government agencies explore on behalf of us, but not actually exploring it ourselves. Science should be disruptively accessible – empowering people from a variety of different backgrounds to explore, participate in, and build new ways of interacting with and contributing to science. By having a fresh set of eyes from those who solve different types of problems, new concepts often emerge and go on to influence science in unexpected ways. A grassroots effort called Science Hack Day aims to bridge the gap between the science, technology and design industries. A Hack Day is a 48 hour all-night event that brings different people with good ideas together in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results.

Presenters:

Ariel Waldman, Spacehack.org

Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the creator of Science Hack Day SF, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also the coordinator for Science Hack Days around the world, an interaction designer, and a research affiliate with Institute For The Future.

Additionally, she sits on the advisory board for the SETI Institute‘s science radio show Big Picture Science, is a contributor to the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, and is the founder of CupcakeCamp. In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley. Previously, she was a CoLab Program Coordinator at NASA, a Digital Anthropologist at VML (a WPP agency), and a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget.

Jeremy Keith, Web Developer, Clearleft Ltd

An Irish web developer living in Brighton, England making websites with Clearleft.

Matt Bellis, Research Assoc, Northern Illinois University

Matt is a particle physicist by training and is searching for signs of New Physics using data from the BaBar electron-positron collider experiment and the CoGeNT dark matter detection experiment. To these ends he is exploring new computing solutions to these challenges.

He is interested in both data visualization and sonification. He is also involved in efforts to engage the public in science and teach them as much physics as they can handle.

Matt received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and later worked at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University. He is currently teaching and doing research at Northern Illinois University.

In the fall, Matt will begin his new job as a professor, teaching and continuing his physics research at Siena College in upstate-NY.